Partners Function Best When Setting Board Meeting Agendas

Board-Savvy Superintendent

It was a troubled marriage of “firsts” from the outset. A first-contract superintendent. A new board chair chosen at his first meeting after being elected in November as part of a new board majority. And the first quarrel began with a subject that would come up month in, month out: Who creates the meeting agenda?

With both AASA and the National School Boards Association measuring average superintendent and school board member tenure at four years, how the leadership marriage begins can go a long way to cementing — or fragmenting — the superintendent/board relationship. And it can easily start wrong through creation of the monthly board meeting agenda.

In a survey of more than 400 participants at this year’s Kentucky School Boards Association annual conference, 35 percent of respondents said their agendas were created by the superintendent acting alone and 1 percent were crafted by the board chair alone. A whopping 64 percent came from a regular collaboration between the two leaders.

Experience teaches the latter represents the best approach to support a solid working relationship.

Potential Problems

When the superintendent sets the agenda with no consultation, the CEO is in the position of determining not just content but also order. Without input at least from the board chair, the administration can fall prey to criticism of over-controlling what the board can and cannot consider. And, of course, it isn’t called a “board meeting” for nothing.

It’s not hard to see the potential problems when the board chair sets the agenda unaided by the superintendent. Among the tasks a board expects of a superintendent are informing board members about what bills need to be paid, what contracts must be considered and what budgetary or personnel decisions must be made at particular points of the year.

Several benefits arise from a true collaboration between a superintendent and the board chair when setting the meeting agenda:

• Professional staff and community representatives share decision making on matters such as meeting time management and placement of reports and public comment periods, and the occasions when moving things around would be advantageous.
• Complaints from select board members about their agenda-related requests can be minimized when the board’s hired top administrator and its elected chief talk about those choices.
• As most board meetings (in Kentucky, anyway) are led by the chair, involvement in agenda development should give her or him a firm understanding of the issues that will be up for consideration and those that require action on the spot.
• If episodes of discontent tied to the agenda arise, a from-the-start sharing of responsibilities for meeting construction may reduce some finger pointing. And if a change in process is called for, both the board and the administration are at the table to craft and present a compromise going forward.

Teamwork Displayed

In a few Kentucky cases, the superintendent is joined by the board chair and the vice chair in pre-meeting discussions to fashion the agenda. While each additional participant taxes scheduling arrangements, a board/superintendent team with agenda-related issues might consider this option as both a show of good faith and a move toward resolution.

It would be easy for a school board to say, “Superintendent, we hired you to be our chief executive, so bring us a monthly roadmap for meeting action.” And this might work 11 meetings a year. But potential problems linked to the agenda of that 12th monthly meeting might be avoided when both the board and superintendent have fingerprints on the scheme of the schedule.

The most solid board/superintendent teams exhibit shared governance for an effective school system and, most importantly, for excellence in the classroom. Why not begin where that teamwork makes the greatest impact?

Brad Hughes is director of member support and communications services at the Kentucky School Boards Association in Frankfort, Ky.
@ksbanews